Which is greek to me. Essentially I got pair of insoles with various built in distortions and support bits to push my feet back into some semblance of a proper shape and thereby fix my knee-pain. I have to wear them for at least an hour a day (at which point I should have tired, achy feet) and then 5 hours break, until I can wear them full time. No exercise until I can wear them for two days with minimal discomfort.

Over the next 6 weeks as my feet, knees and posture adjusts I can expect foot pain, knee pain, hip pain. back pain and possibly neck pain. Although I am not guaranteed to get them all and certainly not all at once. After 6 weeks it should all be gone. So far I have experienced or more likely imagined the back pain and knee pain bits. But I always had the knee pain so that probably doesn’t count!

All in all, I’m not sure I am cut out to watch movies anymore. Not at 9euros a pop anyway. And this just isn’t because I am becoming a grumpy crank!

Generally my first thought is “I could have spent 9 euros on a book, but I am here instead” and that on its own can be quite a high standard to live up to (even in the case of crap novels). More damning for SF and Fantasy movies in particular “The book was better than this” or “he stole that bit from this book”. One of the reasons I never liked the first Matrix movie was I thought the whole thing was just completely derivative of a number of very good SF books, and a number of not so good ones as well. As well of course as being badly acted, scripted, directed and being internally inconsistent and nonsensical – I am willing to suspend belief not logic,

Further, not having a TV at the moment (1 year TV free in the apartment) also means I am not exposed to bad quality viusal entertaiment on a dauly basis (coffe time excepted) so I have also lost the “no matter how bad this is, it can’t be as bad as TV” instinct.

I can’t say what I am looking for in a movie, because generally I don’t know myself. More and more I find myself asking what the movie is about before making a judgement to go see it. And I mean whats it about in a detailed sense, action, plot, acting, etc – one of the reasons I didn’t go see 28 days later was it sounded like it was going to be crap, and I haven’t heard anything since then to make we want to get/rent it on DVD either. It means I don’t go to the movies much, don’t expect much from the movies I do see and am generally right in not expecting much. But that doesn’t mean I have to like it.

That a movie should be well directed and acted and wide in scope, yet providing an intimate and revealing character viewpoint goers without saying. As well as that stories should be strong and innovative; in a good way not innvotave in a “I saw this in the matrix lets do it for an hour and a half way”, or “wouldn’t it be cool to do star wars in the 17th Century way” or even a “lets take a theme ride from disney and make it a movie” way! Characters need motivations to do stuff, stuff should not just happen becaus the plot depends on it (Star Wars is a really bad example of this, Annakin and Obi Wan need to fight so Obi Wan needs to talk to Padame and her reaction has to be to run to Annakin (who conveniently told her where he was going, even though he told her NOTHING ELSE IN THE ENTIRE MOVIE!!!) so Obi Wan follows her and Voila! we have a fight scene. Movie over. next!). Stuff should happens because of earlier stuff that happened (that was in charcter and consistent with the setting), or beacuse of random crap that happens, people die all the time from accidents in real life, why not in the movies! And then the characters need to grow (or not) in reacting to all this, causing more stuff to happen and so on.

Turned up at the cinema, paid my 9euros and got sent home with a copy of the game and told to make up as much crap dialogue and exposition as we liked between missions.

Yes I’ve been to Star Wars, and while it didn’t happen as above I think I would have been better off if it had. I knew things weren’t going to work out to well when I tried to book tickets over the phone and the new staff didn’t know how to work the ticket machine properly. So that when we turned up to collect the tickets and it took them 10 minutes to find the order and print tickets and all I could think to myself was “I hope I’m not charged for 4 tickets every time they swipe the card and the machine beeps. ” And I still don’t know as the online banking system hasn’t updated after the weekend yet! And what little dramatic tension that anecdote has is still more than the movie.

Revenge of the Sith is a bad bad movie. In spite of any limitations on plot and character development Lucas may have walked himself into by squandering the opportunity of the first two movies, we still deserved better than this. I’m not going to get into a long rant on this as I may not be able to stop anytime soon. So. Plot? There was a plot? I never noticed – except a plot ti extract a large amount of money from people for cinema tickets and asorted goodies. Acting? Wooden. Character Development? How much does been chopped in half and burned alive 5 mins before the end count? Not much thats what! And its not chracter development if stuff only happens to one character and that was stuff that we knew had to happen anyway. Its like watching the Passion of the Christ and hoping jesus gets away in the end! Where were we – ah yes! direction? Bad, I can see George now – put special effect here, we have an opportunity to make a game/toy out of this so lets put a bit of product placement here, replace all the muppets with CGI and replace all the real actors with muppets. Action!

The special effects are spectacular enough and there was quite a lot of them making the whole thing seem rather busy at times. But they aren’t the substitution for acting, direction, plot, and genuine action, suspense and thrills that the blockbuster movie making and watching public seem to think they are. Especially not if there is always someting happening in the background to distract you from any important stuff is going on in the scene, not that that was a problem in this movie. There was anything important happening in the foreground anyway.

As well as agreeing with Jamie’s comments I would follow up that horse tranquilisers should have been provided for the audience and at least we could have sat around in a more-than-usual stupor pointing and laughing and saying “ooh! shiny” as appropriate.

Yesterday was our last ashtangayogaclass for this year. I think I did pretty well through the year, attending 27 out of 28 classes. I’m even a bit more flexible than I was way back in September. Not sure how much of that would have spontaneously happened even without yoga, but credit where credit is due; I suppose!

No new yoga classes until September so for the summer I shall have to make do with fencing, aerobics, gym stuff, whatever hill walking the group organises and a bit of running. I suppose I should also practice!!!

Of course by September thanks to my shiny new orthotics, and my newly re(de)formed feet; knee pain and foot pain shall be a thing of the past. That will probably be equivalent to a whole summers prcatice all by itself.

UPDATE: Of course there are better and more pro-active (a bit of Darn speak there) things to do than merely denigrate and/or avoid the movie. Instead turn up at all the cinema showings, strike a noble pose, and burn the whole place down with the barbarians inside.